A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Our Lord said to his disciples, do not suppose that my mission on earth just listen to this. But imagine you're hearing this for the first time. Our lord said to his apostles, do not suppose that my mission on earth is to spread peace. My mission is to spread not peace but division.
Have you ever seen that on an Easter card? I have come to set a man notice how our lord keeps hammering at this almost ad nauseam. Well, it is ad nauseam. I have come to set a man at odds with his father. Notice he's talking to Jews whose family relationships were as tight as could be, and to think of a son revolting against his father was unthinkable.
That's the point of the the the anarchist the son. I have come to set a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, in short, to make a man's enemies those of his very own household. If that isn't stern stuff, I've never heard it. Whoever loves father or mother, son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. He who will not take up his cross and come after me is not worthy of me.
He who seeks only himself brings himself to ruin. Whereas he who brings himself to naught for my sake discovers who he is. He who welcomes you welcomes me, and he who welcomes me welcomes him who sent me. And he who welcomes a prophet because he bears the name of a prophet receives a prophet's reward. He who welcomes a holy man because he is known to be holy receives a holy man's reward.
I promise you that whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of these lowly ones because he is a disciple will not want for his reward. When our lord had finished instructing his 12 disciples, he left that locality to teach and to preach in the towns, And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Now let's face it. Because if we face these texts, if we keep them if they go in one ear and we stop them from going out of the other, if they fail to make an impression on us because they are so often heard, it's routine.
Well, they won't make any impression. But anyone who takes this half seriously or even at least bit seriously and tries to make sense out of this, you're in trouble. Because what our lord is saying here is absolutely contradictory of the world. Because in most instances, all this talk about peace is generally the absence of conflict, conflict, and that's a negation. And how can a negation be the object of anything?
It's a nothing. Our lord these words here are notice you can't miss the thrust of it because he keeps repeating it and repeating it in this concrete of terms as you can imagine, that he has come not to bring peace. He says that explicitly. He says, I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter against mother-in-law. Remember, that tie was very tight.
I have come to spread dissension, division. That's how that's god speaking. Think about it. Think about that in your life. What do you expect of being a follower of Christ?
What do you expect of of living as a Christian a Christian life? Most of us expect the same thing as a secular humanist, a comfortable, secure life. Now there's nothing wrong in wanting that. There's nothing wrong in working for it. There's nothing wrong in desiring it.
Everything is wrong about it if we leave out god because all of those things do not get us to heaven. None of them. Matter of fact, they can obstruct it. You see, this is tough stuff. This is really tough if you take it seriously.
Because you've got the the world's view of peace is so has so much in this country. Remember, when in The United States Of America today, I mean The USA, not Canada, not Mexico. I'm talking about The USA. We are so screwed up when it comes to talking about values as they like to see, that's the word they like to talk about, values. We don't know whether we're standing on our heads or what.
There's no nation on God's earth that is so mixed up about the things that count as The United States Of America. That's a plain simple statement because even the good god fearing atheists of Russia, they had a consistent look of life. We don't as a nation. And and we don't have it at all. At all.
Let me here we are, a rather some Protestant churches would consider this a good congregation on Sunday. I know that for a fact. Some. Here we are sitting here on a Monday morning. None of you had any obligation to come here to church.
Suppose you sat down in the 12 short sentences, wrote what you believe about God, life, the purpose of life, why you're living it this way, and so forth. 12 simple declarative sentences. Then you take up yesterday's New York Times. And on the style section, you have a picture there of, I guess, it's a man and a woman in some way out hotel. They are as disfigured as anything could be.
They don't look human. Now don't ask me why people do this. I'm merely telling you they are just as much citizens of The USA as you are. But what kind of a similarity, to put that use to the least possible word, is there between what they think as they were standing in that hotel lobby and you sitting in this church this morning looking at a tabernacle and going to communion and saying my lord and my god before a white host? Think about it.
That's the that's we are living in a nation where we open the supreme court with prayer, where every session of congress opens with a prayer, where the president taking his oath of office said goes back to god with on our money. It says in godly trust, and yet you can't have a a a neutral blessing for a commencement exercise of a middle school. It's against the constitution, we're told. Now how can you make sense out of that? You can't.
It's absurd because our lord there's no evidence that our lord ever read Aristotle, but he didn't have to. He had he had his own logic, which happens to be the same thing as Aristotle. Because as soon as you say something is true, as soon as you take a stand that something is true, then you have absolutely necessary to say its contraries and its contradictories are false. And you have to say I love the truth. I hate its opposites.
You have to take that stand. You can't avoid it. As soon as you say this is true, you are saying its opposites are false. And you can't love falsehood, can you? Or can you?
Or is there no such thing as truth? Because then there's no such thing as falsehood. And if there's no such thing as falsehood, there's no such thing as truth. These words of our lord today are absolutely catastrophic if we take them seriously. And I have an impression that he meant them to be taken seriously because the peace of Christ is not the absence of turbulence.
The only sane definition that I know of Christ's peace is simply salvation. And I've tested this out with with some from from Jewish gentlemen who say the same thing about the word for peace in Hebrew. It means salvation under God, which can be completely compatible with turbulence. As a matter of fact, the turbulence goes along with it, and we have the word of Jesus Christ for it. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.